Global Perspectives on Religion and Food

In multi-level marketing companies (MLMs), agents sell products and assemble sales teams, ‘downlines’, from whose sales they receive a commission. MLMs are popular but controversial due to pyramid distribution models that favour few agents who join early and their reliance on sales to friends/families. MLMs appeal to women by emphasizing flexibility, family, domesticity, positivity, and empowerment; however, this may not account for the unpaid, invisible, and emotional labour endured by MLM agents. MLMs recruit members of religious groups that may endorse certain gender roles and body expectations. Many MLMs sell weight-loss products, which draw from harmful body, gendered faith, and corporatized empowerment messages. This paper will report on the preliminary development of a ‘pyramidal prejudices’ framework based on a literature review and multi-modal critical discourse analysis of MLMs’ social media posts that considers the fatphobic, faith, and post-feminist aspirational labour discourses of MLMs, which help shape their influence.

The paper explores the intersections between food as a repository and archive of memory and connection to the past, the lingering presence of apartheid and the colonial history of slavery in the Cape, and the contemporary sociality of food-making in the context of a Muslim community in Cape Town. Drawing on a genealogy of Cape Malay food history, the paper discusses the ways in which the contemporary making of Cape Malay/Capetonian Muslim foods evoke, ascertain and imagine embodied foodscapes of the past and of the present. The paper is particularly attentive to narratives connecting the present to the presence of the past and the subversive potential of food-making. That is, food as memory-work and edible acts of re-membering, food as offering a site for contestation of the dominant legacies of the past, and food as a powerful aromatic response to histories of erasure, displacement and marginalisation.

Ashram communities, today, are largely defined by their guru and mostly always, His, bloated reputation. In this, we miss people’s practices, engagement with rituals, which rarely, if ever, inform ashram life. Visiting an ashram in Vrindavan, Unfurling Ashram Life pays close attention to mango for its ability to unfurl ashram life. So often things that seem inherently religious—Gods, guru, or sacred texts—inform our understandings of religion. A piece of fruit like mango is consumed and thrown away, without much thought about its entanglements constituting ashram-specific rituals, as well as conceptions about guru, bhakti, seva, gender, caste and class dynamics, Islamophobia, climate change, colonialism, and South Asia. This paper is an ethnography about mango, including the mango-inspired paisley design inside a Vrindavan ashram.